“Anyway, we made contact with one of his people,” Heming was saying. “He was coming up here on business anyway. We’ll see him tomorrow afternoon.”
“Watch where he goes,” said Darjan.
Heming looked bemused at that. “Of course we would. But…you don’t think he’s intending to make contact with some other organization…do you?”
“If he’s smart he won’t,” said Darjan. “If he’s smart he’ll play ball strictly with us, on the one side…and leave everybody else strictly alone, on the other. But I’m sure he knows better than to go to anyone else, anyway. It’s not as if the offer he’s been made is a bad one.”
“Unless…” Heming looked suddenly concerned. “Unless he’s decided to jump into the arms of some law-enforcement organization or another….”
They both sat quite still for a moment. Then Darjan shook his head.
“He wouldn’t be so stupid. It would be suicidal. Anyway, he could tell them anything he liked, but there’d be no evidence to back the claim. We’ve been most careful to cover ourselves completely in all our dealings with him.” He lifted the frosty glass sitting on the table and sipped at it, put it down again. “No,” Darjan said at last. “I don’t see it as being a problem. Nonetheless…keep an eye on his whereabouts for the next few days, until we have a result that favors what our principals want, and things begin to settle down.”
They looked down the parkway. The leaves of the trees were starting to stir a little now. “How are the principals doing?” Heming said.
Darjan paused a good while before replying. “They’re twitching. What do you expect? Even in years when things go according to plan, they twitch. There are always factors they can’t control in the other sports they run. Weather, civil unrest, player injuries…But this is worse, in a way, because it could have been controlled further down the line, if anyone had thought it was necessary. No one did. Now…” Darjan trailed off. “Now it’s too late, and matters can’t just be allowed to take their course. Now people have to start getting involved to stop it. And the upper-ups hate having to do anything that looks like involvement. It’s too easy to leave a trace, a trail….”
The sky was darkening, going not so much gray as a weird kind of bruise-green, and slowly the wind continued to rise. “Well,” Heming said, “after tomorrow, when we lay down the law…and also the reward for doing what he’s told…you should be able to tell them to stop worrying. Between that, and what Chicago should do to them in a few days, a lot of people should be pretty relieved.”
“So the arrangements are in place for the tournament ‘cubic,’ then….”
Darjan stretched. “They’re just there for experiment’s sake at the moment. The intervention is expected to be minimal at best. We may not even need them. Shouldn’t, if Chicago delivers. If we do need to use them…” He shrugged. “We’ll use them judiciously enough that no one will suspect anything. It’s a test, as I said. For possible use elsewhere.”
They were both silent for the moment as the bar waiter came around by their table, making his rounds through the lounge space. “Anything, gentlemen?”
They shook their heads. The waiter went off to one of the few other tables that was presently occupied. It was one of the reasons the two of them were here — this place tended to be quiet in the afternoons. When he was well out of range, Darjan said, “The game is two o’clock Sunday. Without overtime and with the usual breaks between the halves, it’ll be over around four-thirty. I’ll be expecting to hear from you at five. And so will they.”
Heming nodded. He reached down and picked up his glass again, jingling the ice cubes in it a little. “Chicago,” he said.
Darjan nodded once and held up his glass as well, but didn’t clink it with Heming’s. Heming gave him a look, waiting. Finally he drank.
A wild electric flicker came from down the parkway in the direction of the art museum, followed by a long rumble of thunder that rolled up the parkway on a sudden, gusty bluster of wind; and behind it, pelting down diagonally, came the rain.
Heming shivered, and finished his drink.
The next morning Catie got up much earlier than she strictly had to on a Saturday. Partly it was to get some chores done, for over the last few days, she had somewhat slighted her attention to the chores roster that her mother had left written on the slick white LivePad faired into the refrigerator door. Specifically, the word lawn, which had been there by itself on the LivePad on Tuesday, had additionally been circled sometime on Wednesday, and on Thursday had had many flashing arrows in various colors drawn pointing to it. Then, some time last night, it had developed an alarming number of exclamation points which alternately flashed red and blue like some kind of warning from the local emergency services. Her mom might nag, Catie thought as she got the lawn mower out of the garage around nine, but at least she did it in a way that made you laugh rather than want to leave home.
The mower was a John Deere “Hunter,” powered by photovoltaic panels on the top, and normally mowing the lawn was just a matter of taking it out of the garage, putting the meter-square box-on-wheels out on the grass, and turning it loose. The border sensors and the onboard motor normally did the rest — though there was one spot near the corner of the front lawn where you had to watch the thing, especially if the lawn was fairly overgrown, as it was today. For some reason, under such conditions, the mower tended to roll out onto the sidewalk or the driveway, get itself confused, and then either run out into the street looking for more lawn, or make its way over to the next-door neighbor’s lawn and start mowing that. However, at eight in the morning, with the sun still low behind the trees, there wasn’t enough light yet to power the photovoltaics, so Catie had to fit the battery pack module to the mower body before she set it out on the lawn and hit the Go button on the remote.
The mower trundled off, its cutter buzzing, and Catie sat down on the front steps to keep an eye on it, at least until it was away from the spot where it liked to stage the Great Escape. She rubbed her eyes. Even after her shower, they felt a little grainy. She had spent a good while last night looking over various articles and vids about South Florida Spat in the sports press, and some excerpts from virtcasts which she had earlier instructed her workspace to find and save for her. Interest in the team was certainly building fast. One story suggested that the team, which hadn’t been able to secure any corporate sponsorship at all a year or two ago, was now being wooed by some of the biggest sportswear companies, and offered very lucrative support packages if only South Florida would include their logos on its virtual spat uniform…excluding all the other companies, of course. What seemed to be surprising the sports commentators, though, as much as the big companies themselves, was that South Florida had so far turned down all these offers. No one seemed to know what to make of this.
The mower came up to the low box hedge on the left side of the front lawn, turned left and left again, and began to mow a stripe parallel to the one it had just done, closest to the sidewalk. Catie watched it carefully. It’s almost as if they can’t understand any team that doesn’t behave exactly the way all the professional ones do, she thought. Like they find it impossible to believe that an amateur team wouldn’t automatically want to be professional, the first chance it got.